A key point is that there are large indirect costs that scale up rapidly that are not accounted for in these direct costs. These costs show up on the balance sheet somewhere else in the government, which makes the ROI for the auditors look much better than it actually is.
This is well-understood by the Federal government. When they set their targets they fully account for the growth of indirect costs created by the audit activity that don’t show up in the ratio.
That “415:1” is misleading and manipulative. The target rate of recovery is ~10:1, which is roughly what the IRS actually achieves.
Audits are not an infinite money glitch. I used to work for a Federal audit agency that also recovered ~10:1. The reason we target 10:1 recovery on audits is because the return on funding additional audits beyond that falls off very sharply. Furthermore, more aggressive auditing greatly increases compliance costs which ultimately come back as costs to the Federal government, so the net recovered revenue is even less than the headline figure.
Audit recoveries tend to be about sloppy compliance, not people trying to cheat the system. People with more complex taxes are more likely to screw up the exponentially more complex compliance aspects. Auditors are mostly fighting entropy.
I'll admit - the 415:1 was pulled from an article detailing information from 2024 but the main point isn't the actual value but the fact that it's more than 1:1. When the IRS receives more funding the US government gets more money than what it is budgeting - this doesn't scale to infinity, at some point you'll have nearly complete auditing capture and more budget will just be burning money but we're no where near that point.
Putting money into the IRS is basically a free money printer for the US government and it's only deep corruption that keeps it so poorly funded.
There are substantial indirect costs not accounted for in that ratio. Anywhere close to 1:1 is a large net loss to the government. Your mental model of the cost effectiveness of audits completely ignores large second-order effects.
The Federal government has a century of empirical data on this. They set their targets accordingly, which as a heuristic is roughly optimal at around 10:1. This may not be intuitive to you. It wasn’t to me either until I worked at a Federal audit agency. Most of it actually makes sense once you understand the bigger picture.
Second order effects is where the real damage is done.
That extra tax specialist could have been an additional production line worker, which would have created volume, which would have lowered prices, which would have made inputs for other goods cheaper, etc.
It is really wild when you think at a macro level, how much value is destroyed, all due to indirect costs which are extremely difficult to estimate.
Inflation! Just use the money printer to print more money! Subsidy checks for everyone! Unexpected bonus checks for military personnel, brand new accounts for children with money that needs to be invested in an approved stock market index fund, throwing even more money at DHS and the DoD budgets!
I know several people with normie jobs (not tech related or government) and normie lifestyles that saved up enough money to never need to work again by 50 while still maintaining their lifestyle. Most still work because they have no idea what to do with their time even though they don’t need to work anymore.
You can easily derive that this is possible from the median household finance statistics published by BLS, never mind the upper class. It isn’t that hard if you care to do it.
I said in another reply, that’s actually a real Plan B. We are going to stay in Costa Rica for 5 weeks starting next week and my wife and I are both learning Spanish now. I’m at around an A2 CEFR level.
I’ve already researched the residency requirements for both there and Panama
Costa Rica doesn’t tax foreign income. But logically it only makes sense to establish residence there if I am not working. CAJA - their healthcare system would be about the same price as my employer provided healthcare.
I already don’t pay state tax living in Florida and I would pay federal tax either way.
Zig is essentially a substantially improved and enhanced C, both in character and intent. There is a lot to recommend it for applications where you might otherwise use C.
This is true, state gov does own many universities, though there was a concerted effort to bring the idea of privatization and deregulation there too since at least the 1990s by cutting subsidies.
I met a Polish student a number of years ago who was attending a U.S. Ivy League institution. She said people made fun of her back home for "buying her degree". That has stuck with me ever since.
People with lumpy incomes get absolutely brutalized by the tax code. It sucks but also not easy to remedy. The calculations and exemptions change every year, so it isn’t as simple as looking back five years and averaging it.
All I'm saying is that their should be a way to recapture the taxes if you've suddenly gone from tons of income to no income. Even the figures I'm citing are not a lot of money in some places like the CA bay area, unfortunately.
This is cyclical. There is nothing particularly onerous about the current situation compared to previous cycles at this point. An adult will experience a few of these cycles over their career. You should be prepared for it to happen.
I understand that it might be shocking for a young person who has never lived through this before. It also sucks to enter the job market at the bottom of one of these cycles. The bottom almost never lasts more than a year or two, which seems like an eternity while you are in it.
The article opens with someone who was making six-figures at 47 years old in a low-cost-of-living part of the country. They’ve seen a few of these cycles already and with a modicum of prudent planning would be well-positioned to ride it out.
Hostility to labor has been accelerating throughout my 25 years in the workforce. Graduated into dotcom bust then global financial crisis then another massive transfer of wealth to the already ultra-wealthy in response to covid. If you don't already have yours good luck getting it.
SonarQube is pretty useless for quality control unless your process is already broken, in which case you should probably fix your process.
I once worked at a company where the powers-that-be decided to add SonarQube with max settings to the pipeline for a large C++ code base. It produced no output so IT thought the install was broken. They eventually figured out that it was actually working perfectly but that it never found any issues across the entire code base ever. We got that for free with sensible build configurations long before it got to SonarQube.
TDD and tools are not a substitute for competent process. I’ve seen plenty of TDD produce objectively poor quality code bases.
It didn’t take AI to destroy Open Source, we were already doing it to ourselves. LLMs just magnified the existing structural issues and made them even easier to exploit. But the trajectory was already clear.
Why don’t they do the same with food then? There is a similar issue where truly vast amounts of food is destroyed every year. Agriculture has a high environmental and carbon footprint. Countless tons of e.g. wheat straight to the landfill, not even used as animal feed. The demand for the product is unpredictable and they need to produce and sell enough to cover the investment in producing it at all on average. There is also a fuzzy limit on how much the market can absorb.
The underlying dynamic is simple: the value of the product in every market exceeds the logistics cost of moving the product to that market. In other words, the market clearing price is globally negative. Because most of the cost of production is in the logistics, and destruction can be done close to the point of production, the resource and environmental footprint of destruction is smaller than every alternative.
People don’t produce excess inventory for fun, that is a pure loss. The production is highly optimized to eke out a thin average margin in an unpredictable business. If the product is not destroyed, it necessarily increases the average cost of those products because either logistics costs go up or supply goes down.
Are you arguing against yourself to provide an example of why this law is bad…or do you actually want to force people to eat rotten/spoiled food?
You seem to provide a great example of why Eurocrats regulating a highly efficient market will not cause the desired outcome…due to reality.
> Agriculture has a high environmental and carbon footprint.
Yes, keeping 8 billion humans alive does have non-negligible energy costs. Again I can’t tell if this is sarcasm or if you’re an anti-human environmental terrorist.
If you actually care about agriculture emissions though, population decline will cause this to go down faster than any Eurocrat will with silly laws based on some clickbait news article they read about an industry they understand nothing about.
This is well-understood by the Federal government. When they set their targets they fully account for the growth of indirect costs created by the audit activity that don’t show up in the ratio.
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